Sunday Dec 09, 2007

Someone asked for my favorite output of Cory Doctorow's. Easy choice for
me, as it's the short story "Craphound," the lead-off entry in the
"Place So Foreign" short story collection and the piece that lends its
name to Cory's website. I love Craphound because of the contrasts it
paints, in very short form, reminding us of what it means to be human.
Doctorow is a sci-fi author who eschews aliens, at least on space opera
stages, and yet an alien figures prominently in this story - not to
imagine perfection or advanced evolution, but to serve as a both
a sidekick and foil for the human hero.

The story also reminds me of why I collect pucks and hockey
cards and Hard Rock Cafe pins and hockey jerseys and biblical era coins
and neatly organized and classified other piles of things, because
they remind me of my childhood, or a place, or a time. Collecting
is about searching, whether for the perfect piece to complete a theme
or for the last of an item that you need to have for the sake of having.
Sometimes there is perfection in uniqueness.
Uniquely and decidedly human, yet touching on perfection. That's why
I continue to re-read and listen to the podcast of "Craphound," because
Doctorow reminds us of the joys of being human, and of remembering the
joys of our childhoods, as expressed through things that trigger that
joy in that memory.

Contrast that endpoint with the story line segment drawn by Thomas Klise in
"The Last Western," a book referenced by Doug Horning in his baseball
tome "The Boys
of October." In Klise's book, a poor boy emerges as the ultimate
professional baseball pitcher, commander of an unhittable fastball.
As the perfect games mount, Willie, the protagonist, goes from hero to villain,
reviled by fans for ruining their pastime with his perfection. Most people
refer to "The Last Western" as a religious book, part fictional biography
and equal elements hagiography, putting perfection into the light thrown
by our respective belief systems.
When encountered, whether through a perfect fit for that
hole in your collection, a
perfect baseball game, or a perfect number, perfection reminds us that
most of the time, we live in a world of chance and choices, not all of
them ideal or best, but all adding to the unpredictability of being human.
Perfection in small doses is massively fun; experiencing it creates a
short story to be retold of witnessing a perfect game, a perfect goal, or
closing the last-minute eBay bid on the perfect bit of historical context.
If we believe that sports performance is based on equal mixes of science
and intent, it is a small leap of faith to understand how people mix sports and religious
metaphors with zero intent of blasphemy. Lake Placid's
Miracle on Ice anyone?
The Immaculate Reception in Steel Town? Barry Bonds looking up to his
father, still, after hitting a home run?
Princeton University president and
noted researcher Shirley Tilghman said "we must
avoid the suggestion that science and faith are mutually exclusive —
they are different manifestations of the human experience."

Perfection, faith, science and memories of our youth: there you have
the ingredients for Doctorow's "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow."
The 3-part story is set in 20-year increments, paralleling the timing of
the rotating stage of Disney's Carousel of Progress, a Tomorrowland
attraction whose theme songs lend their titles to this story. Jimmy, the
protagonist of the story, is given immortality by his father through a
set of genetic experiments. It's the stuff of science, not religion.
Through the first two parts of the story Jimmy works hard to undo his
brush with perfection, at least from a chronological point of view,
while simultaneously decoupling his being from the Carousel of Progress
itself, which his father had rescued, cared for, and effectively turned
into the moss-covered family credenza of Jimmy's lost family. The
Carousel isn't just a family heirloom; it's the future perfect, the
plus parfait view of what might happen.

Genetic manipulation and immortality conspire against Jimmy, as he
ends up in truly virtual form. A scientific and computational view
of perfection, perhaps, until Jimmy discovers that there are bugs in
his perception of his avatar that make perception clash with his long-lived
human experience. Is he perfect, and yet still affected by the work of humans?
Is he human, reflected in the tag line and title of the story, always
looking to the great big beautiful shining through the night, or at
least through some variable transparency in his rendering platform?

I'll admit that at the end of the podcast, I felt elated, that Jimmy
had merged immortality and humanity in some way; I felt relieved, that
Jimmy's extended family was united in a construct that felt destructive
until that point; and I felt
confused, in that the resolution felt less human, and therefore less
real. I extruded equal elements of Robin Williams in "What Dreams
May Come," Chris Moriarity's "Spin State" and the very end of Frank
Herbert's "Dune" series, all of which blur the line between
perceived experience and physical being. If, as Doctorow suggests, we can
rest assured that "now is the best time of our lives," then there's
really no difference, and Jimmy should enjoy an endless
ride around the carousel, each circuit shared with the ever-changing
experience of his family.

Monday Feb 12, 2007

Baseball has been a forerunner of technology for decades: night games played
under high-intensity lights, televised games bringing the American national
pastime into American living rooms, and in July 2000,
mlb.com delivering pitch by pitch animated network casting of live games,
along with a treasure trove of statistics, video, images, and most recently,
a public fan blogging facility.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media is the image of scalability, with
about 2 billion visitors a season, over 2,400 games from April to October,
and a fan base that is willing to stay up until 3 AM on a Tuesday night
if the Twins are playing and that fan happens to be in the Middle East.
The content volume generated per day, the level of interactivity with the
site, the statistics and the game delivery in a variety of real-time
or compressed-time formats, crossed with the fact that blogs and fantasy
leagues make it all writeable, and you have a Web 2.0 franchise player.

Justin Shaffer, VP of Architecture
at MLBAM and I went 9 innings on how to avoid chin music from the
big boss (and the fans) when your technology platform throws
wild pitches and how mlb.com consistently delivers the high cheese
to a growing variety of devices. If you want the full story modulo
the inappropriately used baseball slang, check out
our latest Innovating@Sun podcast.